Posts Tagged ‘Sasha Dichter’

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Happy Generosity Day 2012!

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Sasha Dichter’s Blog.

I’m so excited – the day is here and I’m getting wonderful generosity stories from far and wide.

One person went to a simple, down-home restaurant and appreciated the service so much that he left a tip “as if it had been a four star restaurant;” another guy asked the flower vendor how much he was going to charge for roses on Valentine’s Day (double) and just paid that amount yesterday; someone else had a long conversation with the security guard at the bank who was counting the minutes until the end of his shift.

Today you can give yourself permission to be outrageously kind, irrationally warm, improbably generous.  I promise it will be a blast.

(BONUS: please share what you did or generous acts you witnessed in text/photo/video on the Causes site)

Sitting at the center of this fabulous maelstrom, it’s a joy to see the spirit and love people have put into making today everything it can be.  We have three (three!!) beautiful videos – Celebrating Generosity Day (See3 Communications); Generosity Day: What is Love (Jubilee Project); and Me to We – Generosity Everyday (Hodge Pictures).   These videos are alternately fun, irreverent, heartwarming, joyful, and profound, and to see other storytellers take this story forward is a true joy for me.

The Huffington Post’s take on Generosity Day is on the home page of their Impact section and the lead story of their Good News section, and we have blogs and tweets coming from all directions.  (click here to see it all unfold in real time).

Also a special thanks to all the bloggers out there who have helped spread the word, with a special shout-out to Beth, Brene, Katya, Scott and Seth.

Have a great day!

As Acumen Fund’s Chief Innovation Officer, Sasha is responsible for growing the impact of Acumen Fund’s work through our investment in leaders and the spread of ideas.  This includes the Acumen Fund Fellows Program and +acumen chapters; our work in knowledge, metrics, and policy; as well as resource mobilization from our global Partner community. Sasha holds a BA from Harvard College, a Masters in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard’s Kennedy School and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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Generosity economy

Friday, September 30th, 2011

In the ultimate world-colliding evening, last night I attended the graduation for the Class of 2011 Acumen Fund Fellows.  These 10 Fellows, selected from 700 applicants from more than 60 countries, are a humbling and inspiring assembly of talent, commitment, grit, drive, and empathy, and they spend a year working with Acumen Fund investees in India, Pakistan and East Africa as a training ground for lives in social change.

Chris Anderson, curator of the TED conference and all-around deep thinker and mind-bender, gave the Fellows graduation speech, and he led it off saying, “Thanks to a nice talk featured on the TED.com website last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about generosity and the role it plays in our lives.”  I couldn’t feel more humbled, or more honored, that Chris took the time to reflect on generosity – he’s the one who helped us all understand that taking the most incredible, insightful, and (at the time) exclusive content in the world and giving it away for free was the right business strategy and the right thing for the world.  He’s the ultimate generosity inspiration.

Chris started off talking about the evolutionary and biological bases for generosity, and all the research that has been done on the value of reciprocity, especially amongst pairings of individuals and groups that have reason to believe that they will have multiple encounters over time.  But he went further and shared research from experiments in which one subject was given $100 and had the option to give away any amount of that money, with the knowledge that the amount given away would triple.  Many subjects gave away all $100, and, even better, many recipients then gave back $150 to their donor.

Generosity begets generosity.  Trust begets trust.

At the same time, it’s incredibly easy to break the cycle – all you need is one shirker and the whole things spirals into a “no trust” equilibrium.  But the cycle can be broken: someone can take a generosity risk and reset the system.

At any moment, we have the chance through our individual actions to transform others’ behaviors.

Going further still, Chris observed that the best way to create generous action is through transparency: tell people to behave however they want to behave, but add the caveat that how they acted will be publicly known, and people act much more generous.

Transparency transforms behaviors.

Chris’ final observation is that we can be generous in infinite ways, not just in sharing our money but in sharing our thoughts, our ideas, our wisdom, and that today the friction around sharing what we have to give has reduced dramatically.

It’s easier than ever to give (= spread ideas)

And suddenly we arrive at the big conclusion (not Chris’ exact words)

Increased transparency (e.g. living in a Facebook world) + frictionless idea-sharing (e.g. living in a blogging, YouTube, TED world) = We are living in a generosity economy

Discuss.

Sasha Dichter is Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund. This post originally appeared on his blog, where he writes on generosity, philanthropy and social change.

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Is ______ an impact investor?

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

Last Monday I had the chance to speak at the iiSummit on Impact Investing,  organized by Kellogg and the Chicago Booth School.  It is exciting to see the level of interest in impact investing growing everywhere (beyond the obvious hotbeds of New York, San Francisco, and Washington, DC).  The goal of the conference was to explore how the tools of impact investing could be applied in the Midwest.

During one of the conference breaks, I had a conversation with a student who wanted my take on whether Bank Rakyat Indonesia, the Indonesian microfinance bank where I worked a decade ago, is an impact investor.

I was and continue to be stumped by the question, and I think the question sheds light on a worrisome trend in our space.

Let me explain.

What the question seemed to be about was whether BRI aims to have social impact, specifically because the interest rates are “high” (~25% p.a.); because it does collateralized lending (as opposed to group lending); and because, it was implied, BRI is highly profit-seeking.

My take on BRI is a little different: 25% p.a. interest rates are in line with global microfinance interest rates (so I have trouble arguing that they should be lower); limiting itself to collateralized lending does mean that BRI is likely serving the better-off segment of low-income customers, but these customers still clearly have a need for these services;  and, at least when I was there, BRI had a 4:1 ratio of savings to lending – which is only possible because it is a regulated financial institution.   Since I personally think that savings might be more powerful to the poor than lending as a tool to smooth consumption and have capital available for big expenditures (which is really what a lot of microlending is all about), I think this a really big deal.  So, in sum, I’m a fan of BRI from what I saw when I worked there.

But I digress.

What the question got me thinking about was that, rather than asking, “Do you think that BRI is having significant, positive social impact?” the question was “Is BRI an impact investor?”

The implication seemed to be that “impact investing,” as the coolest, hottest trend in our space, is a proxy phrase for doing good work, a notion that was reinforced by the numerous speakers who qualified lots of worthwhile, not-so-new activities (negative screen, public market investing first pioneered by Domini; positive screen, public market investing best represented by Generation Investment Management; CRA lending everywhere; everything that OPIC has done for the last few decades) as “impact investing.”

Personally, I don’t care what is or is not “impact investing.”  What I care about is whether we are creating positive social change.

Impact investing, to me, is nothing more and nothing less than the use of investment tools for social ends. Our collective “aha moment” was the realization that investors can strike a deal with sources of capital whereby social impact goals are made explicit.  This allows investors (stewards of others’ capital) to pursue social goals without shirking their fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits.   Volia, we have more tools (not just grants) that we can use to pursue social impact.

This is simple enough and hard to disagree with.

But from this perspective, I find myself discouraged by the “finance first” and “impact first” terminology that’s become popular in our space.  It feels trite.  Isn’t the whole point of “impact investing” the “impact” piece?  Without that you have investing – which can create all sorts of impacts (positive and negative; financial and social).  But either you set out to create positive social change or you don’t.  The idea that you’d set out to create only a little positive social change…what exactly does that mean?

I don’t want to know whether you or I or anyone else is an impact investor. I want to know how much social impact you and I are creating with a dollar (or a euro, or a rupee, or a shilling, or whatever).  Everything else, to me, is just old wine in new bottles.

This post originally appeared on Sasha Dichter’s blog, where he writes on generosity, philanthropy and social change. Sasha Dichter is Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund.

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My toothbrush was good enough

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

My toothbrush was good enough.  In fact, it had been good enough for a while.  I didn’t need the Colgate 360 toothbrush, and I doubt you did either.

Admittedly, it’s an impressive toothbrush.  Look at all the features packed into this baby: a tongue and cheek cleaner, multi-function bristles, polishing cups, a raised cleaning tip to “tackle those hard-to-reach places at the back of your mouth,” and (of course) those handy-dandy “raised rubber grips for better grip, and wide thumb grips for better control.”

I’ve got nothing against good oral hygiene.  Please brush and floss daily, with whatever toothbrush works for you.

My point is that it’s obvious that we are WAY down the curve of declining marginal benefits for innovation on the toothbrush as a product.  Do we need a no-slip handle with gel and little knobby bits?  No. I don’t think toothbrushes were flying across bathrooms across America, causing anger and frustration for millions, and leaving mouths full of unsanitary plaque and gingivitis.

Even if the handy-dandy Colgate 360 is demonstrably better than the straight-handled, one-type-of-bristle toothbrush I got for free from the dentist in the 70s, you’ve gotta believe that we are, today, somewhere near the pinnacle of how much better the manual toothbrush can get.

Yet the world is set up so that it makes good sense to keep on tricking out our toothbrushes.  On the back of the 360, Colgate’s share of the toothbrush market has jumped from 28% to 36% in the last two years.  The better brush is paying off for them, for now.

But what will the next 50 years bring?  How much better can our toothbrushes get?  We’re hitting a wall in terms of improvements here, yet that won’t stop armies of our best and brightest from fighting over toothbrush market share for the next few decades and beyond.

So the question becomes: how do we shift the frameworks and the incentives so that more of our massive ability to innovate gets applied to things that – we can all agree – matter more and are harder to tackle?    Because I for one am betting on the power of innovation, much more than more money, as the greatest lever in accelerating the fight on poverty and social exclusion.  Yes, the rise of social enterprise, the entry of the Gates Foundation on the scene, more progressive philanthropy and the overall improvement in the quality of analysis and thinking in our space are all encouraging, but we’re still getting lapped by the toothbrush-makers, the razor-blade improvers, and the folks rolling out ever-more-clever financial products.

So when I’m asked whether I think the social enterprise space has gotten too “hot” for its own good and whether there are too many people chasing too few jobs, I think nothing of the sort.  My hope is that we’re at the beginning of a generation-long trend in which our best and brightest feel a sense of calling, of responsibility, and of service that will fundamentally transform our labor force, how we live our values, and, ultimately, the societies we build here and around the globe.

A big piece of this will be a shift in incentives, in what we value, and in who we hold up as heroes.  The faster we can make this shift, the better, because I for one am not looking forward to the inevitable wunder-razor that no doubt will dominate supermarket shelves in 2050 (thanks Russell!!):

Sasha Dichter is Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund. This post originally appeared on his personal blog – check it out here.

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The spirit of service

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

This post originally appeared on Sasha Dichter’s Blog on April 8, 2011.

Most people get into nonprofit work because they want – in some way, big or small – to change the world.  This spirit of service defines our missions, which are not vague platitudes about “delighting customers” or delivering “superior results to our stakeholders,” but are real, tangible, and laudable: end malarial deaths in Africa by 2015, feed the hungry in New York City, make the foster care system work for kids, enable every kid in Harlem to go to college.

And yet.

And yet we get busy with “the job,” and it can become more real and more palpable than the mission.  We sit at desks day after day looking at spreadsheets or writing yet another report, and though we hear the echo of why we’re there, this original purpose can morph – not immediately, but eventually – into background noise.

We’re wired, fundamentally, only to experience fully the reality in front of us.  And because our daily interactions, the stresses of life, the honest considerations about our own goals and aspirations, dominate our experience, there’s the risk that this day-to-day reality gets decoupled from the spirit of service we expect to pervade our work.  And so, like at any job, there are high points and low points, successes and disappointments, days when our contributions are recognized and days when someone (peer, boss, donor, board member) is careless in how they speak to us.  We, too, have highs and lows.

Unless.

Unless we take every opportunity to stoke the fire that burns within – for ourselves and for our peers.

Unless we look for chances to keep that flame lit, by giving our employees, our volunteers, our donors a chance to feel, breathe, see and touch the service that is at the core of what we do.

Unless we create space to swap stories, whether close by or far away, of people whose lives have been transformed by our work.

Unless we find moments, hours, days, to pull back from the frenzy that pervades our days (how could it not? The problems are so big, our urgency so great) to reconnect to the original sense of what we’re here to do.

We are blessed to have the privilege to serve others.  And it is a privilege.  There is no higher calling.

From that kernel of truth, I’ve no choice but to wonder: is it naïve to think that we might conceptualize our professional lives differently?  Is it possible that the question “what’s best for me, for my career, for my life?” should pale in comparison to the question “am I doing the most good I can possibly do?”

Because I do believe that one has a different orientation when one says, “I’m here to make a change in the world” (goal-oriented, and with it ego) and when one says, “I’m here to serve.”  To be sure, if we, our employees, our volunteers, our donors do not feel nourished, respected, honored, and challenged, then there is no way we can serve others effectively.  But are careers dedicated to service fundamentally different?  What is the right balance here?

Sasha Dichter is Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund. Check out his blog, where he writes on generosity, philanthropy and social change.

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